Eyetracking Heatmap: How Searchers View the Google One Box

From the Marketing Sherpa report excerpt: a heatmap…revealing how actual consumersâ€™ eyes view listings. As you may be aware, the red blob is where most searchers looked directly; as colors change, the level of attention goes down. The â€œXâ€ indicates where searchers clicked, and the red horizontal bar shows how far down folks scrolled to view listings.

Among their key findings: … is the attention to which search users pay what we call the â€œbullet pointsâ€ within top listings… these eyetracking results indicate you canâ€™t afford to wait for a time when Google stops changing the One Box (if indeed they ever stop changing.)… In addition, as our past eyetracking tests (also included in the appendix of this Guide) have
revealed:
– Thereâ€™s a â€œred triangleâ€ of attention in the upper-left corner, beyond which eyes donâ€™t
stray.

There have been some discussions here and elsewhere about what the value of the onebox local listing was to a business. This research points toward the critical nature of the upper area of the screen and particularly of the onebox in all of its forms.

It appears that the users have a strong propensity to focus and click on the local listing onebox links and only the top two organic listings. It may be hot at the top but it gets cold pretty quickly as you move down the page. Thus, you really need to strive for both a top 3 Local Onebox listing AND a top 3 organic listing on your “location + service” phrase.

Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.

Eyetracking Heatmap: How Searchers View the Google One Box
by Mike Blumenthal

4 thoughts on “Eyetracking Heatmap: How Searchers View the Google One Box”

excellent find, i’ve seen the entire Marketing Sherpa report and there is even better info then this on local/maps and more…I don’t think that I can mention it on here though…its something you buy so they’d be pissed if I talked about it. Keep up the good work, I love reading your blog!